Slashdot Mirror
What Happens In A Gaming Industry Shakeout
Chris Kohler's Game|Life blog has a post discussing what a real games industry crash looks like. From the article: "But I hate the ridiculous amount of misinformation that gets spread around about what happened to the game industry in 1984. And the fact that the awful years of 1994 and 1995 get totally whitewashed in history articles like the above, as if the games industry has been just peachy ever since Nintendo got here. Well, it hasn't been. And what happened in 1984 isn't what people think." His post is a reaction to previously mentioned Inquirer story.
Color display (a fairly good one too) and good games. Columns had a Tetris-like appeal. If it hadn't been for the utterly shitty battery life, it could have taken out the GameBoy. My favorite piece of "could have been" tech.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I don't think the video game industry is capable of a crash at this point, or even much of a shake-down. Even if the next generation of game consoles and the games themselves are seriously underwhelming, the industry is at a point where it could weather the storm for a while.
/. articles about the Gamecube have been about falling sales figures, but somehow Nintendo is still in the black. There are a lot of questions about if they'll survive for much longer, but they've been hanging on for a while now and building up a large bankroll. Their conservative attitude suggests that they won't be going under anytime soon.
First of all, Microsoft has billions of dollars that it makes from other business divisions, even if its games division takes a billion dollar shelling every year. Interestingly enough, this has already happened and they've said they're still staying in the game. The Xbox 360 would have to be a huge failure for them to get out of the game at this point. If the recent buzz about the system and the fact that someone can sell them on ebay for several thousand dollars is any indication, I don't think they've got much to worry about.
Next up is Sony which has made a lot of money on the PS2 and has the largest install and fan base. It might be slightly eroded this generation, but like Microsoft they have other company divisions that can prop up their games division if they're hit by hard times. However, of the big three, I'd put them in the worst position right now.
Finally, there's Nintendo. If I've learned anything about Nintendo it's that even if their sales are crap, they still manage to turn a healthy profit. The last few
The gaming industry is also a lot bigger than it used to be. Sure, companies are still packaging crap in cases that they try to pass for games, but when the user base is so much bigger than it used to be, you can manage to stay afloat with mediocraty. The industry might undergo a slump or slight depression, which I could easily forsee, but the same kind of "crash" or "shake-down" mentioned in the article? Nah...
Doom Doom II Descent Mechwarrior 2 Magic Carpet Syndicate That period of time was the greatest gaming period in my life. It was the era that got me into building my own computer, hauling my "steel beast" of a machine down to my friends house for LAN parties, and downloading tons of shareware and warez off the internet. Hmm, I guess since I didn't pay for most of the software I had back then, that could've caused problems for the companies, but damn if I wasn't having a blast!
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
I agree that the two "shake outs" are not completely comparable.
Well, they're not at all comparable. Either this guy didn't actually live through the crash of 84 as he says he did, or he's just completely forgot about it.
Christmas of 1983 was a disaster, and that was after a huge drop in the stock market price of all of the major game manufacturers (which constricted their investment). The losses incurred in 1983 and 1984 were staggering. It's pretty disingenuous to say both Atari and the Intellivision lived on after that - Mattel practically went out of business (the electronics division in fact did; INTV Corp came in and picked up the scraps), Coleco exited the business after only 2 years, and even the mighty Atari, owned by Warner, was forced to cut their losses.
Console gaming died in 1984. I mean that literally. 1984 was the only time in the past 40 that no major home console was on the market in the United States. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine today walking into a Toys R Us and seeing not a single video game system on display? Can you imagine GameStop switching back to selling business software? Can you imagine Microsoft/SubLogic Flight Simulator II being the #1 game?
That's what happened in 1984. I'm 34, and I was there. It was a crash.
You can't say that because INTV later took over Mattel's stock and started selling the scraps mail order-only that that means nothing really happened. Or that the fact that a gutted and reorganized Atari released a new console three years after exiting the market, that that also means there was no crash. And what of Coleco? He doesn't even mention them. Where's the Coleco Vision in 1985?
After 1984, the entire center of gravity for the industry shifted to Japan. Prior to 1984, most Americans were not even aware that people played games outside of the United States. All game consoles (as we knew them) were American. That's just the way it was. By 1985, every console on the market would be Japanese. (The Atari 7800 was not officially on the market until 1987 and was never a serious contender. The later Jaguar was not really a factor at all and finally put the company under.)
There was nothing remotely comparable in 1994-1995. Nintendo continued making money hand over fist. Sony was just beginning their initial investment. Sega was the only major manufacturer experiencing hard times, but nobody thought that was anything but a momentary blip at that time... and in fact it was not clear who would ultimately win the 32 bit race for several years. Atari was still around, but by this time they were playing a bit part. They never recovered from the crash.
This guy brings up all the minor players - which historically have never done well in the console industry - and selectively uses them to prove a non-existent point about 94-95. Why doesn't he mention Magnavox in 1980? Or Vectrex in 1983? What about all the other 3DO's and Amigas over the years? There have been plenty. These sorts of companies and systems do not indicate industry trends - it would be like talking about the "crash of 2004" because the Tapwave Zodiac was a flop. Isn't it obvious that it's the major players in the industry that matter, not these circus sideshows?
I'm probably a little more annoyed at this "article" than I should be, but it's completely revisionist history. He cites one article full of wishful thinking that he probably read in an Electronic Games magazine he just bought off of Ebay and uses that as a basis for his whole entry. Some of us actually remember what it was like back then, walking into TRU and seeing a bunch of Cabbage Patch Kids where the video games used to be.